Weekly Newsletter

Iceland Ranks 3rd In Per Capita Electronic Waste

There might be a lot of ways that Iceland is green, but handling electronic waste isn’t one of them.

The Guardian reports that new research on the subject of electronic waste has been compiled by the United Nations University, which is the UN’s educational and research branch.

According to their findings, 2014 set a new record in terms of the sheer amount of electronic waste – discarded parts of computers, televisions, and other electrical appliances. Globally, in this year alone 41.8m tonnes of electronic waste was discarded, “the equivalent of 1.15m heavy trucks, forming a line 23,000km (14,300 miles) long”.

The greatest per capita offended was Norway, which threw out 28.4kg per inhabitant, while Switzerland threw out 26.3kg per person. Iceland did not do much better, as the country’s per capita e-waste comes to 26.1kg per person.

In fairness, this works out to “only” a little over 8,430 tonnes of total electronic waste coming from Iceland in 2014. The biggest offenders in terms of volume per country – the US and China – dumped 32% of the global total of electronic waste.

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